Well, it’s been a while. I’d like to make an excuse of forgetting my login details or having some prolonged episode of amnesia for not blogging but…t’would all be a lie. I think the truth lies somewhere in an amalgam of laziness, cynicism and introversion. However, I have been metaphorically kicked up the rear end by the recent Doctoral Study Week and inspired by peers and colleagues alike to get back on the old blogging bike and start pedaling again (or perhaps that should be peddling again).
The study week itself had a range of interesting stuff going on (thanks to Dr Joss Winn and colleagues for pulling it together) and much discussion had and thought was provoked, including the exceptionally valuable revisiting of the principles of research formulation and literature reviews. The highlight of the week, though, was the student conference where everybody told the story of their research…a lovely collegiate, PowerPoint free way of hearing from fellow students – an approach which really engaged the audience with the emotion of people’s research motivations.
So late afternoon, to spoil it all, I waded in with 1.75MB of projected ‘death by’ to introduce and defend my EdD thesis proposal on Creativity as an Employability Skill in HE. The introduce bit didn’t worry me…always happy to spin a yarn, but despite spending much of my sporting career dodging bouncers on the cricket pitch, the defend bit was causing some pre-match anxiety. I don’t know enough; I hadn’t read enough; my methods are flawed; the audience knows more than me and will out me as a fraud with their questions.…..but too late to go back now.
Apart from being upstaged by the keynote speaker earlier that afternoon (Constructivist Grounded Theory was MY big party piece!) the introduction went as planned, even the ukulele chords (long story, see later blog) and appeared to keep the audience’s attention. On completion, with clammy palms, I mumbled the obligatory ‘so, does anybody have any questions?’ , hoping that as the last speaker of the day, people would be keen to keep their mouths shut and shuffle off to an early tea. Not a bit of it; the salvo began immediately. Without really hearing the first few words, my immediate reaction was ‘run’ but then two rather unexpected things happened….1) the audience had two huge heated debates about two things I had said – reflexive photography and Simonton’s (2009) domain regressive model of creativity. Again similar to my cricketing career, I just sat at the side of the pitch and watched the battle commence, even to the point where the chair said ‘could we just stop and let James say something’. Hmmm, perhaps my research is worth listening to; 2) I could actually answer the questions and, in most cases, with some confidence. Who me? Yeah you. Perhaps I do know a bit about this after all.
The takeaway points from this experience, as I saw it, were twofold. Firstly, saying something out loud to an interested audience is a great leveler and, although perhaps risky, is always worth doing. Much as though those great inspirations we have at our study desks at 2am when the caffeine is flowing may appear worthy, running them by peers really helps defines your thinking about what is actually needed and how to go about it. I got some great feedback that has significantly helped and changed my method and research questions. Secondly, people are genuinely interested not critical. Okay, this audience was probably skewed towards being more positive and constructive than usual but they didn’t have to be. The experienced senior academics in the room could have really made my life difficult but they didn’t; challenging, yes, but difficult or destructive, no.
So, I take heart from this experience and encourage anybody to share and present their work if the opportunity arises. It is worth it and you know more than you’ll admit to. As a passage from the book One Man and His Bike by Mike Carter says
‘Don’t worry about what others think. They’ll support you, because the act of striving unites us all. Learn. Just try. Something very magical happens when you try.’
JW
Ph.D, me and a bit of creativity 